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Lou Reed, Metallica, and Pop’s Other Odd Couples

October 25, 2011

Metallica and Lou Reed are strange bedfellows. Five years ago, if you had suggested a collaboration between the grizzled New York veteran and the angsty metal outfit, you would have been laughed out of the room. But after meeting during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th Anniversary concert in 2009, Reed and Metallica cooked up an album-length project: “Lulu,” a set of Reed songs based on the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s famous fin de siècle works. You can read our review of the result here. In the meantime, we have spent days—well, okay, parts of one day—racking our brains for other pop music collaborations this bizarre. (In September, Gay Talese wrote about the striking pairing of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.) Five others are below.

Leftfield/John Lydon, “Open Up” (1990)

Leftfield is an electronica duo that consists of Paul Daley and Neil Barnes. John Lydon is not. But the pair somehow ended up collaborating with the ex-Pistol on this eastern-flavored dance song. Leftfield’s beats and Lydon’s bite worked well together; the song was a hit and the album on which it appeared, “Leftism,” earned a Mercury Prize nomination.

Alicia Keys and Jack White, “Another Way To Die” (2008)

Jack White will collaborate with almost anyone—Insane Clown Posse, Loretta Lynn, Conan O’Brien—so it’s hard to pick just one of his side projects. This one gets the nod because it had overtly commercial ambitions: the song was the theme to the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace.”

Jay-Z and Linkin Park, “Collision Course” (2004)

Many of pop music’s oddest collaborations are one-offs: single songs created in part to showcase the distance between artists. This is, like Loutallica, a full album. The collaboration grew out of MTV’s short-lived “Mash Ups” show, and, in fact, the album is a mashup, with Linkin Park’s songs smashing headlong into Jay-Z’s raps. There was no new material for the album, but there was plenty of new arranging—attempts to fit Linkin Park lead singer Mike Shinoda in alongside Jay-Z. Here is the album’s first single, “Numb/Encore.”

Shaun Cassidy/Todd Rundgren, “Rebel Rebel” (1980)

Cassidy was a waning teen-pop star bidding for rock ‘n’ roll legitimacy. Rundgren was a mad-genius producer and performer who had created some of the oddest albums of the seventies (“A Wizard, A True Star”), along with some of the best (“Something/Anything”). The result of their meeting, Cassidy’s “Wasp,” is one of the strangest rock albums of all time, equally beloved and despised. Cassidy’s take on David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” with Rundgren and his band highly prominent in the mix, is representative of the sound: impeccable song choice, incredibly overproduced, and destined for cult fame. (The album also includes a very nice version of The Who’s “So Sad About Us.”)

Both Brown and Pavarotti have passed on since this performance, though not as a direct result of it. Surprisingly, this duet—which took place in Modena in 2002—somehow managed to put both outsized talents into one massively melodramatic song without spiraling out of control. It should be noted that Lou Reed has also collaborated with Pavarotti—the two of them performed Reed’s “Perfect Day” in 2001.